Bright young thing's pipedream still alive

Page Tools

On form, style, rankings and class, Torah Bright should be one
of the first Australian athletes selected for the Turin Winter
Olympics. But she won't be.

Bright, 18, missed a golden opportunity to make the Australian
team when she badly miscalculated the conditions at the halfpipe
world championships at Whistler, British Columbia, last
weekend.

Not that anyone is thinking Bright, the top Australian and world
No.2, will miss next year's Games: she need finish only in the top
20 per cent of a World Cup competition in the lead-up to secure her
spot.

"I am very confident of getting that qualifying," she said.

"It is quite bizarre that it happened [missing both her world
title runs] - it was almost a lapse of concentration, because I had
been practising so well."

Bright said her big mistake was not realising the halfpipe wall
had been re-built at a different slant than usual, which affected
her first trick, an inverted, 540-degree spin.

"It was only after the first run I realised that there was no
way I could come around back into the pipe," she said, "and I had
to change my game plan for the second run, and that was going well
until my third trick, where I didn't execute it enough and I
fell."

But Bright, a former student at Snowy Mountains Grammar School
in Jindabyne who lives eight months of the year in her newly bought
Salt Lake City flat, is philosophical about the hitch to her
plans.

One of the first phone calls she received was from a sponsor
joking that her most immediate priority would now be the World Cup
meeting in Italy, where she hopes to qualify, rather than
fulfilling her burgeoning calendar of photo shoots.

Bright said keeping sponsors happy, getting enough rest and time
for training was a constant juggling act.

But she knows, too, the benefits of her generous smile and long
blonde hair. She is the face of a firm's snow wear and has her
moniker plastered over their garment tags, in catalogues and
posters. She is the snowboarder that thousands of Xbox game players
mimic in Amped 2. And the modelling pays the bills.

"I could be doing so much in the season for them, but it is the
Olympic Games that I am working towards this year," she said.

Bright has been working on two new tricks and planned to use one
had she made the finals of the world championships. It is an
"alley-oop backside rodeo", which she explained as "an inverted
spin on my unnatural side, which looks good and the judges would
have marked it high for originality because no one else is doing
it".

She said she might try it at the World Cup meeting in Italy.

This weekend she is competing in the high-rating XTreme Games in
Colorado.